The managed hand Kang, Miliann
2010., 20100502, 2010, 2010-06-02
eBook
Two women, virtual strangers, sit hand-in-hand across a narrow table, both intent on the same thing-achieving the perfect manicure. Encounters like this occur thousands of times across the United ...States in nail salons increasingly owned and operated by Asian immigrants. This study looks closely for the first time at these intimate encounters, focusing on New York City, where such nail salons have become ubiquitous. Drawing from rich and compelling interviews, Miliann Kang takes us inside the nail industry, asking such questions as: Why have nail salons become so popular? Why do so many Asian women, and Korean women in particular, provide these services? Kang discovers multiple motivations for the manicure-from the pampering of white middle class women to the artistic self-expression of working class African American women to the mass consumption of body-related services. Contrary to notions of beauty service establishments as spaces for building community among women, The Managed Hand finds that while tentative and fragile solidarities can emerge across the manicure table, they generally give way to even more powerful divisions of race, class, and immigration.
Reproductive exclusion refers both to the policing of borders based on acceptable forms of reproduction, and the policing of reproduction of those already within these borders. Building on the ...contributions of Asian American feminist scholarship, reproductive exclusion serves as an analytic to foreground the status of Asian Americans as the first group to be formally excluded from immigration based on race. It brings reproductive politics more centrally into Asian American Studies, and highlights the defining critiques of Asian American studies regarding race, gender, sexuality, immigration, citizenship, war, empire, and diasporic and transnational processes in debates regarding reproductive politics.
How transnational modernity is taking shape in and in
relation to Asia Fashion and Beauty in the Time of
Asia considers the role of bodily aesthetics in the shaping of
Asian modernities and the ...formation of the so-called "Asian
Century." S. Heijin Lee, Christina H. Moon, and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu
train our eyes on sites as far-flung, varied, and intimate as
Guangzhou and Los Angeles, Saigon and Seoul, New York and Toronto.
They map the transregional connections, ever-evolving aspirations
and sensibilities, and new worlds and life paths forged through
engagements with fashion and beauty. Contributors consider American
influence on plastic surgery in Korea, Vietnamese debates about
"the fashionable," and the costs and commitments demanded of those
who make and wear fast fashion, from Chinese garment workers to
Nepalese nail technicians in New York who are mandated to dress
"fashionably." In doing so, this interdisciplinary anthology moves
beyond common characterizations of Asians and the Asian diaspora as
simply abject laborers or frenzied consumers, analyzing who the
modern Asian subject is now: what they wear and how they work,
move, eat, and shop.
As one of the largest women‐dominated employment niches in many national contexts, the teaching profession has been widely studied, yet the gender, work and family negotiations within this profession ...deserve fuller attention. The case study of South Korean teachers, one of the most highly qualified teaching workforces in the world, illuminates how particular professions create specific challenges as well as supports for work and family that can counter national patterns of women's low labour force participation. This study engages with theoretical debates regarding ‘work–family conflict' and ‘work–life balance' to develop the alternative framework of ‘work–family alignment' giving greater attention to cultural, ideological and functional dimensions within specific occupations and national contexts. However, rather than expanding opportunities for women, work–family alignment often depends on conformity to normative gender roles — both at work and within families. Nonetheless, the framework of work–family alignment can inform policy implementation by demonstrating that both functional and ideological supports are needed for workplace and state policies to be effective.
This ethnographic study of service interactions in Korean immigrant women-owned nail salons in New York City introduces the concept "body labor" to designate a type of gendered work that involves the ...management of emotions in body-related service provision. The author explores variation in the performance of body labor caused by the intersection of the gendered processes of beauty service work with the racialized and class-specific service expectations of diverse customers. The study examines three distinct patterns of service provision that are shaped by racial and class inequalities between women: (1) high-service body labor, (2) expressive body labor, and (3) routinized body labor. These patterns demonstrate that a caring, attentive style of emotional display is dominant in workplaces governed by white, middle-class "feeling rules" but that different racial and class locations call forth other forms of gendered emotional management that focus on displaying respect, reciprocity, fairness, competence, and efficiency.
In the summer of 2015, the New York Times (Times) published an explosive front-page series by Sara Maslin Nir on the “The Price of Nice Nails” and “Perfect Nails, Poisoned Workers.”¹ This series ...shined much-needed light on labor rights violations, toxic chemical exposures, and occupational health risk in New York City nail salons. Nir’s language and arguments, however, particularly her focus on a “rigid racial and ethnic caste system,”² placed most of the blame on Korean immigrant small business owners for labor conditions they alone did not create and by themselves cannot fix. This framing of the story not only
